Galway Kinnell Poems

There is a fork in a branch
of an ancient, enormous maple,
one of a grove of such trees,
where I climb sometimes and sit and look out
...

Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt.
Someone had called it a man/woman
...

The old watch: their
thick eyes
puff and foreclose by the moon.The young, heads
trailed by the beginnings of necks,
...

He climbed to the top
of one of those million white pines
set out across the emptying pastures
of the fifties - some program to enrich the rich
...

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.
...

While spoon-feeding him with one hand
she holds his hand with her other hand,
or rather lets it rest on top of his,
which is permanently clenched shut.
...

In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
...

Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
...

I can feel she has got out of bed.
That means it is seven a.m.
I have been lying with eyes shut,
thinking, or possibly dreaming,
...

In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
...